Revolution

When I first started ‘waking up’ a few years ago, I became interested in Anarchism. Like many people with a liberal background (see previous article on the individual and socio-cultural environment), I was impressed by how social structures constrain and limit people. 

Most people who don’t take the time to think about themselves and their environment simply adopt the values and culture supported by the social structures around them. Using our individual-environment model, we can say that the environment feeds strongly into the individual, but most individuals simply regurgitate this feed of values and culture back into the environment, contributing little to its growth and evolution. Most of us are like the human batteries in the Matrix (what would we ever use for analogies had that movie never been made? , never questioning the reality or legitimacy of the environment presented to us.

At the time, I determined that if the social structures were forcibly changed, that individuals could be changed, in this case freed, as well. This is true to a large extent, of course, but it also neglects the role of the autonomy of the individual, one of the very ideals we are trying to realize through social change in the first place. That is, it focuses solely on how to change the society to effect change in (”freeing”) the individual. It does not consider how it may be possible to develop the individual to change society.

The Individual is the Society

I became conscious of problems with a solely revolutionary approach to freedom as I began reading Krishnamurti. As a rational Atheist kneeling at the altar of Science, I was naturally skeptical of this don’t-follow-gurus-preaching-guru. But as I read The First and Last Freedom, my skepticism turned to confusion (I was largely inspired to begin having an open relationship even though it has almost nothing to do with what Krishnamurti was saying) and then interest and respect. Although the romantic notion of revolution was alluring, Krishnamurti’s cautioning that all revolutions lead back to the status quo resonated with me. He noted that the means are the end (violence leads to violence) and that revolution, as it is a reaction to a tyrannical government, is ultimately defined by it. A revolution is often just that. Another turn of the wheel. How can revolution effect real change if the individuals in that society don’t also transform themselves?

The T.A.Z.

I reread Hakim Bey’s (pen name of Peter Lamborn Wilson) T.A.Z. and his poetic argument that the individual himself need only free himself to live as a free Anarchist. He simply need not accept the given social structures and cultural values to determine his own freedom. T.A.Z. also takes the Anarchist dinner party analogy to its artistic conclusion. Bey, in his beautiful poetic essays, explored how spaces (like pirate utopias) and the collection of people who inhabit them can espouse many Anarchistic ideals through their emergent behavior. He called such spaces Temporary Autonomous Zones (T.A.Z.s). Early ravers, the Burning Man Festival, the music of Bill Laswell (which is how I came to first know of Bey back in high school) and many others have been influenced by the T.A.Z.

Self-Development

Following Krishnamurti into the present through Deepak Chopra (Chopra was inspired by what Krishnamurit had to say, but believed he would be better able to express it to people) and through Steve Pavlina (his article on 10 reasons never to get a job was the catalyst that first began my journey of awakening in the first place), I was led into the world of self-development. I had once been extremely skeptical and dismissive of self-development material, but I was soon reading and gaining respect for even the likes of self-help giants like Anthony Robbins. Soon, it wasn’t just self-actualization, but other specialized areas like personal finance, seduction and fitness. 

Self-development is ultimately about taking control of your own life according to a lifestyle of your choosing. Its practices and philosophies can be tools in discriminating in what values you choose to inherit from your culture and what you develop in yourself. As you change and become more conscious of yourself and your relationship to society, you influence your environment in turn. This is, of course, the opposite of a political approach to freedom like revolutionary Anarchism, focusing on changing the individual rather than society, with complementary strong and weak points.

Spirituality

Another path opened up to me through Krishnamurti and Chopra, that led me away from faith-in-Science Atheism and towards Spirituality. Many spiritual practices are approaches to finding higher levels of spiritual freedom beyond rather than within the feedback cycle of individual and environment. Traditional approaches have largely found this freedom in the ground of being (ultimate freedom and emptiness before time or space). However, most serious modern spiritual practices are concerned with how to manifest this freedom in the world of form as well as being able to realize your true self in the ground of being. Andrew Cohen interprets this as a Kosmic evolutionary drive towards freedom. Ken Wilber sees this drive as unfolding through the lines and levels of development and quadrants of Integral Theory.

Libertarian Socialism

Earlier this year I finally got around to reading Chomsky on Anarchism. Chomsky is sympathetic to forms of Anarchism that are related to Libertarian Socialism in a lineage that goes back to the Enlightenment. It’s interesting that he stresses both the libertarian, i.e. focusing on the autonomy and freedoms of the individual, and socialist, i.e. celebrating the communion and society of individuals, traditions. Indeed, any philosophy of freedom must understand or at least recognize both sides of the individual and environment relationship to be effective in the world of form (though this understanding can simply be a context for a specialization in either side). 

Integration

Reading Chomsky again after several years and within the context of a more spiritual and integral understanding, I realized many of my interests over the past few years were related in terms of this common theme: the search for freedom. I began to see how these different levels of freedom related and flowed into each other. I believe there is a progression, albeit rough and overlapping, in searching for and understanding freedom.

Spiral Dynamics provides a useful model for understanding this progression, as does any other developmental model like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

The basic freedom is freedom from want. Once you have your basic needs of food, water and shelter satisfied such they are not short-term concerns, you are probably living in a structured society that helps provide these resources. But although such a society frees you at one level (basic needs), it imposes restrictions that constrain you in other ways. This is true going all the way up the hierarchy of freedoms to spiritual forms of freedom, each level solves problems of the previous level and creates new ones for the next level to solve.

With this understanding, we can see how self-development tools helps free the individual in several important ways. Self-imposed individual psychological restrictions can be broken through with psychotherapy, dream analysis, seduction community “inner game” techniques, meditative exercises and behavior and habit changing methods. Personal finance, Tim Ferris-style Lifestyle design, and entrepreneurship can help free the individual from debt and time- and wage-slavery. When “free time” is abundant and finances under control and sufficient, one is free to discover one’s own creative passions (one of the Anarchist ideals). As more individuals on the leading edge achieve self-determination and self-actualization, the society and culture itself will advance.

This doesn’t mean that bottom-up change is the only way to go. Top-down approaches are also needed. Chomsky argues that Anarchists and Libertarian Socialists should support social programs in government if they are aligned with their values even though they increase the scope of government and its involvement. Whereas the ultimate goal of an Anarchist agenda is to be free of hierarchical government, religious and other forms of control, the path towards that goal follows a progressive hierarchy of steps. Within a Spiral Dynamics and Integral Theory understanding, this makes perfect sense. There is no “skipping levels”. From “blue”, a society must progress to “orange” and then “green” (though of course, in any society you will have individuals at many different levels). This is why if you have a revolution attempting to build new social structures to match a Utopian Anarchist (or other ideological) ideal, it doesn’t work and you get something that is pretty similar to what you started with. The level of social consciousness must develop progressively through a hierarchy of developmental levels before the society at large is ready and responsible enough for such an ideal. That being said, we need the leading edge of social activists and revolutionaries to ensure not only that a society’s social structure upholds its values and morals, but stretches them and pushes them up towards the next level.

The modern spiritual practitioner, if she is serious, can find freedom in the ground of being through meditation and contemplation. Spiritual practice alone helps to literally raise the level of consciousness of a culture. But the spiritual practitioner can bring more to the world of form by developing her other lines (moral, psychological) or by engaging in social activism. By doing so, she expresses compassion for the world of form and those within it by helping them reach the next level of freedom.

As in Defined by Limitations, in each level in the hierarchy she pushes beyond the limits of the previous one, embracing a bit more of the world in compassion. The search for freedom in this world is, like the limitations it pushes past, never-ending, but that does not mean that there is no progression. We can continue to discover and expand into higher levels of freedom, becoming progressively more loving and compassionate for all of manifestation.

An individual’s thoughts and actions shape her environment. The environment in turn shapes the individual. We have a simple feedback system. 

The individual shapes the environment and vice versa.

This seems like a simple and obvious truth, but many misunderstandings arise when the context of this simple model is forgotten. 

For example, if your English is good enough to be reading this blog than you’ve probably inherited many of the values and frames of the Western Neo-Liberal culture as I have. One of these frames is that society (the Environment) is bad. Bad society, bad! Society is blamed for, well, society’s ills (hehe) in everything from middle school student essays to mainstream media news outlets. But we as individuals are all integral parts of the society. Someone like Krishnamurti would goes as far as to say that the individual is the society and the society is the individual.

The Inner and Outer of Politics

At the risk of complicating our simple model, let’s introduce Ken Wilber’s AQAL model. Basically, if we split the individual into an interior and exterior component, we get the top two quadrants in AQAL (I = thoughts, feelings and It = body, behavior). Likewise, if we split the environment into an interior and exterior component we get the bottom quadrants (We = culture and Its = systems, society). These four basic perspectives are available to us in any given moment, though we usually are only aware of one.

The Four Quadrants of Integral Theory (source: gaia.com)

Ken Wilber has pointed out that politics in America are largely dominated by Democrats focusing on the exterior quadrants and Republicans on the interior. Let’s take the plight of the inner city youth coming of age in a low-income community. Why does he not get a job? A Republican would say that it’s the individual’s responsibility to be proactive and make his own opportunities. The Democrat would say that the socio-economic conditions facing the individual are near insurmountable. To allow the individual to get a decent job, we have to first improve the socio-economic structure. 

Hey wait, seems like Republicans are blaming the individual, not society! That’s true. But they do also blame the culture. Why isn’t Joe the Unempolyed being proactive? He doesn’t have the right “family” (i.e. cultural) values. The AQAL model distinguishes between culture (”we”, an inner quadrant) and society (”its”, an outer), two concepts that are often confused (in every sense of the word). Thus, Republicans also take on the anti-environment bias of the Neo-liberal tradition but in its inner form as culture (damn that Hollywood, Marilyn Manson and those video games!). 

Psychosis and Society

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand presented in so many words her dystopian vision of a totalitarian society where the justification for all kinds of horrible things is the greater good of society, usually at the expense of the individual. Rand points out that society is in fact made up of individuals, claiming that working for the good of one’s own individual self will actually lead to a better society overall (”rational selfishness”).  

The antagonists in Atlas Shrugged disassociate the individual from her role as an integral member of society. We know from Psychology that elements of the psyche that are disassociated and repressed live on in the shadow (i.e. the unconscious). In Rand’s dystopia, the individual thus becomes repressed and demonized. Atlas Shrugged clearly resonates with the libertarian ideals of the United States as it reasserts the importance and autonomy of the individual in combatting this kind of disassociation.

However, disassociation goes both ways. In the U.S., the individual is put up on a pedestal and it is society (or culture) that is often demonized. This seems to have manifested in popular consciousness as a kind of narcissistic self-deprecation of one’s own American culture. 

Cultural Differences

After becoming conscious of this frame in myself, I began noticing it in many other ex-pats living here in Korea, as well as in American popular culture. Ironically, this disdain for and disassociation from mainstream American culture identifies oneself clearly as being a product of that culture just as much as espousing the values of the supposed mainstream.

Of course, it is not just Americans who are prone to overemphasizing one or the other of these synergistic elements. It’s interesting to see that Koreans who are well-versed in the English language and and hip to American culture also often adopt these kinds of anti-mainstream values and frames. 

In conversations with other Koreans not as well-versed in American culture, they often credit my less constrained lifestyle (polyamorous, no plans to work for a company or get married, taking on several roles at a time: grad student, rocker, spiritual practioner, etc.) to having been brought up in American society and culture. (While there is a lot of truth to that perspective in that my upbringing was an undeniable formative influence, my values and lifestyle are also the result of having the freedom to reflect on who I am and what my relationship is to society by being outside of my home culture in a foreign country.) I often hear: “Yeah, I’d like to do that, too, but I can’t because I’m Korean.” While it is true that Korean culture imposes more rigid social expectations that are harder to avoid, that self-disqualification also neglects the fact that the individual is an integral part of the society. Society and culture changes with the shifting tides of individual values and behaviors. And vice versa. 

Interestingly, however, supposedly open-minded Westerners are often befuddled by Koreans who are more inclined to follow their own paths (i.e. who are on the leading edge of societal change). A good friend of mine is often told by such Westerners that she is “not like other Koreans” implying somehow that she is not authentically Korean because she stretches the confines of her social roles. This turns out to be a common psychological device, by the way, according to Psychology Professor Dovidio:

“Even when presented with multiple exceptions to the stereotype, we often keep the broad category and simply create a subtype.” [New York Times,  My friend's blog excerpt of the same article has much more entertaining pictures.]

Games for the Lazy

The bias that society, or more generally an individual’s environment itself, is a hindrance to the individual pervades even the Computer Science research community.

A currently hot area of research is Ubiquitous (or Pervasive) Computing. One of the projects in my lab has to do with designing ubiquitous games to make boring life tasks more fun. At first I didn’t want to join this research project because of the assumptions and approaches that, as a limited and focused research paper, it must make (I later joined to help with the conference paper writing). One such assumption is that technology should change the environment to suit the individual.

There is nothing wrong with that in of itself (in fact it is a part of the history of human technology and society), but the narrow focus of research paper-writing leads to short-sighted design approaches that only focus on the technology and how it can be used to shape the environment. Such approaches don’t take into account the individual’s level of development or potential for growth. As a result, many such design approaches do away with “good pain” that can lead to personal growth as well as “bad pain” that is just plain pain. But that is a subject for another article.